Saturday, May 28, 2016

Putin’s Longstanding Plan for Long-Term Confrontation with the West Being Implemented Ever More Rapidly, Illarionov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 28 – For the last
decade, Vladimir Putin has pursued a plan to isolate his country from the
outside world by pursuing rearmament and confrontation with the West, Andrey
Illarionov says. Now, there is evidence that the Kremlin leader is stepping up
his efforts I that direction even during the current charm offensive.

In an interview with Radio Liberty,
the Moscow analyst argues that the West should stop viewing Ukraine or Georgia
as the occasion for Putin’s actions and see them instead as symptoms of his
much larger policy, one that he argues has been in place since at least 2006 (svoboda.org/content/transcript/27760793.html).

Putin’s goals over this period have
been to prepare Russia, its people and its economy “for a much longer, more
global and more serious confrontation with the external world” than many now
assume.And these goals were put in
place long before Russia sent troops into Ukraine and long before the West
introduced sanctions.

The Kremlin leader’s “preparation
for war against the outside world began not in 2014, not with the annexation of
Crimea and not with the actions of ‘the little green men’ in the Donbass or in
other places,” Illarionov says. They began much earlier as can be seen by
examining Putin’s 2010 plan for Russian rearmament.

Not only is that plan continuing, he
says, but despite what some think, Moscow’s efforts to realize it are even
intensifying. In 2010, Putin put in place a program for the rearmament of
Russia, one that he said at the time would cost 20 trillion rubles over the following
decade.He has been spending more than
that since by taking money from the Russian population.

But there is an even better indication
that Putin is planning for a long-term confrontation with the West: his
government is buying gold.While the
Russian economy is getting worse, the government’s stockpiles of gold are
growing because if the sanctions regime intensifies, Illarionov says, Moscow can
always use gold to purchase what it wants.

The Russian government’s purchases
of gold in the first quarter of this year, he notes, “broke all previous
records.” But it is important to recognize that these purchases began not at the
start of the war with Ukraine but “already in January 2006. Therefore, the
strategic planning of confrontation with the outside world began just over a
decade ago.”

These gold purchases mean, he
continues, that “preparation for global confrontation with the surrounding
world not only has not stopped but is continuing and its tempo, if we are to
speak honestly, is increasing.” There may be periods when it appears that Putin
is easing off as now in the view of some, but there is no indication that he
has fundamentally changed course.